With tears in his eyes, David Moores handed over the family silver to Tom Hicks and George Gillett.
It was February 2007 and Liverpool FC had just exchanged hands with lifelong Reds fan and majority shareholder Moores finally completing the search for a buyer that had started around three years earlier.
“It’s very hard to think that it won’t be my club anymore,” he said at the time. “Having said that, I’m handing it over to safe hands. They are in it for the long-term because they’re involving their sons so they can plan for the future.”
History, of course, would prove those words to be hopelessly misguided, but Moores felt deep down that he had made the right decision at the time.
Indeed, he wasn’t the only one, with the pair snapping up shares in the club until, on this day in 2007, they announced that they had acquired 98% of the club and intended to complete their buyout of the club in full with the compulsory purchase of the remaining shares.
Weeks earlier, Hicks and Gillett were in position, answering the media at a packed out Anfield just a week after Dubai International Capital had found out they would not be the ones to buy the club.
“The spade has to be in the ground within 60 days,” it was declared on plans for a brand new stadium. The owners had taken out a £350m loan with the Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia.
Of that figure, £105m was immediately dropped on to the club’s books, with the remaining £245m taken on by Kop Holdings, the company set up by the new owners when they purchased the club.
By the end of their reign, Liverpool would be paying around £100,000 per day in interest as the threat of administration closed in.
The language from both Hicks and Gillett, in 2007, more than hinted that they were relative novices of football but with a portfolio of teams that included the Montreal Canadiens, Dallas Stars and the Texas Rangers, the American duo had ample experience in other sports, at least.
Hicks, though, had been burned before in the soccer world. In 1999, he had entered into a partnership to own Cruzeiro and Corinthians in Brazil before leaving four years later.
After legal wranglings and financial troubles, Hicks left without fulfilling the promise of a new stadium. History would sadly repeat itself at Anfield.
But in February 2007, few could have predicted just how catastrophically bad the next three-and-a-half years would prove to be off the field for the Reds.
